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Why DEI Was Doomed to Fail
DEI’s fundamental contradiction was this: It argued that race is a social invention—a system created to control people by reducing complexity—yet it never suggested replacing it with a more holistic vision of justice.
Mar 09, 2025
Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, or DEI, is collapsing—not just as a corporate initiative, but as an ideological framework.
In what seemed like a flash, it became a dominant force in American institutional life, embedded in HR departments, university policies, and media discourse. And now, just as quickly, it finds itself in retreat, with entire DEI offices being gutted across corporate and academic America.
President Donald Trump’s administration has aggressively targeted DEI, issuing executive orders to dismantle these programs across federal agencies. This federal rollback has emboldened Republican-led states to eliminate DEI efforts within public institutions. Meanwhile, MSNBC’s recent firing of Joy Reid, a vocal defender of DEI who embodied many of its most aggressive tendencies, signals a broader cultural shift.
If we want to build a politics that actually addresses racial injustice, we need an approach that is dynamic rather than static—one that acknowledges history without being trapped by it.
The right celebrates this as a victory over “woke ideology.” The left frames it as yet another example of backlash and white fragility. But these explanations fail to account for why DEI has unraveled so quickly.
The reality is that DEI was doomed to fail—not because the principles of diversity, equity, and inclusion are unworthy, but because the framework built around them was structurally flawed.
DEI’s fundamental contradiction was this: It argued that race is a social invention—a system created to control people by reducing complexity—yet it never suggested replacing it.
Instead, it doubled down on racial categorization, reinforcing the very thing it claimed to challenge. This reification of race, rather than dismantling structures of oppression, helped sustain them, making DEI brittle and politically untenable.
For the left, the lesson here is crucial. If we don’t break out of the rigid, black-and-white thinking that DEI promoted, we will continue ceding ground to the right. The need to discuss race and identity remains vital, but it must be done in a way that opens space for complexity rather than reinforcing the very constructs that uphold division.
DEI’s fatal flaw is that it traps itself in a closed loop. It rightly argues that race is a historical construct—a tool of power designed to enforce hierarchy. Yet instead of pushing beyond this construct, it reinforces race as fixed and immutable. The result is an ideological contradiction: Race is framed as an arbitrary invention, yet treated as an unchanging, permanent reality.
James Baldwin exposed the hollowness of racial constructs decades ago. In “On Being ‘White’… and Other Lies,” he wrote: “The crisis of leadership in the white community is remarkable—and terrifying—because there is, in fact, no white community.”
Baldwin understood that whiteness, like all racial identities, was not a biological or cultural fact but a political invention—a shifting construct designed to serve power. Yet DEI never seriously engaged with this idea. It simply replaced one rigid racial hierarchy with another, treating whiteness as an unchanging position of privilege while treating other racial identities as fixed sites of oppression.
This rigidity meant that DEI operated as a closed system, reasserting racial categories rather than interrogating them. It failed to engage with race as a lived, historically contingent process—one shaped by history, class, and material conditions.
By doing this, DEI alienated people across the political spectrum. Many white people, even those who consider themselves progressive, felt that DEI erased any meaningful discussion of economic struggle or historical complexity within whiteness.
Meanwhile, many people of color found DEI’s racial framework superficial—offering corporate-friendly language about inclusion while doing little to address material inequalities. The framework functioned as a kind of racial accounting system, but it lacked a clear political vision for building solidarity.
Sheena Mason, a scholar of racial theory, has articulated the deeper flaw in this approach: “To undo racism, we have to undo our belief in race.”
This insight is crucial. If race itself is a construct designed to justify social stratification, then maintaining race as a primary framework for addressing inequality only reinforces the divisions we claim to want to overcome. Yet DEI never suggested dismantling the concept of race—it only sought to redistribute power within its existing framework.
This was a fatal mistake. Modern genetic science has definitively debunked the biological basis of race. There is more genetic diversity within so-called racial groups than between them. The racial categories that shape our politics and institutions are historical inventions, not natural facts.
Yet DEI, instead of leveraging this knowledge to transcend racial essentialism, entrenches race as the defining lens for justice. This approach not only deepens social division but also makes the left vulnerable to the right’s attacks.
By insisting on the permanence of racial categories, DEI created an ideological framework that could be easily caricatured as divisive and exclusionary—giving conservatives an easy target while failing to deliver meaningful change.
Racial discourse often eclipses broader discussions of material conditions, making it harder to address economic inequality in a meaningful way.
Patricia Hill Collins, a foundational thinker in intersectional theory, has observed that, “Race operates as such an overriding feature of African-American experience in the United States that it not only overshadows economic class relations for Blacks but obscures the significance of economic class within the United States in general.”
DEI’s fixation on race, detached from material conditions, contributed to this very problem. By prioritizing racial categorization over economic struggle, it often obscured the broader systems of inequality that shape American life.
This not only made class politics more difficult to articulate but also allowed racial identity to become a stand-in for structural critique—reinforcing an identity-based framework that often benefited elites more than the working class.
With DEI collapsing, the question becomes: What comes next? The right hopes this marks the end of racial discourse altogether. That cannot happen. Structural racism, economic exclusion, and historical injustice are still deeply embedded in American life. Ignoring the function of racism and racial categories plays into the hands of those who want to maintain both racial and economic inequality.
But we cannot simply replace DEI with another rigid, prepackaged framework that reproduces the same mistakes. If we want to build a politics that actually addresses racial injustice, we need an approach that is dynamic rather than static—one that acknowledges history without being trapped by it.
This means recognizing that racial categories are not timeless truths but historical constructions that have been shaped by economic, political, and social forces. It means rejecting the idea that people are permanently locked into racial identities that define their entire experience. And it means moving beyond an approach that focuses primarily on representation and inclusion toward one that addresses material conditions to redistribute power.
DEI’s failure provides an opportunity for the left to rethink how it engages with race and identity. We need to stop seeing race as an unchanging structure and start understanding it as something that can be transformed. Morgan Freeman put it bluntly in an interview, stating, “I don’t want a Black History Month. Black history is American history.”
This is the kind of shift we need—one that integrates historical understanding rather than segregates it, one that moves past “race”—which we know doesn't exist—as a fixed identity category toward a broader, more holistic vision of justice.
The goal should not be to replace DEI with another top-down, bureaucratic approach, but to build a new paradigm that is open, flexible, and capable of fostering real solidarity.
If the left fails to do this, it will keep losing to the right. And if that happens, the backlash against DEI will not just be the end of a flawed initiative—it will be a major setback for the broader struggle for justice and equality.
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Fueled by Anger at Trump and Corporate Greed, Economic Blackout Underway
"We have the power," said one supporter of the boycott. "We don't have to accept corporate monopolies. We don't have to live with corporate money corrupting our politics."
Feb 28, 2025
After hundreds of thousands of social media users in recent days shared posts calling for an economic blackout at major retail corporations on February 28, the boycott was underway Friday, with proponents saying the aim was to deliver a message about widespread anger over corporate greed "to corporate America directly."
"We have the power. We don't have to accept corporate monopolies. We don't have to live with corporate money corrupting our politics," said former Labor Secretary Robert Reich. "We don't have to accept more tax cuts for billionaires. We don't have to pay more of our hard-earned cash to Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos or Mark Zuckerberg or the other billionaire oligarchs."
The idea of the blackout originated with a self-described "mindfulness and meditation facilitator," John Schwartz, who urged consumers to join the push for "systemic change," emphasizing that the boycott was not targeting President Donald Trump, his billionaire adviser and benefactor Elon Musk, or a political party, as both Democratic and Republican leaders "have manipulated the economy and profited off the working class."
But Schwartz noted on his website for The People's Union USA, "a grassroots movement dedicated to economic resistance, government accountability, and corporate reform," that the group stands "firmly for equality and freedom for ALL people, regardless of race, gender, background, or identity. The idea that companies and institutions should abandon diversity and inclusivity is regressive and unacceptable."
The statement was an apparent reference to Trump's executive order threatening to open investigations into companies that do not dismantle initiatives aimed at promoting "diversity, equity, and inclusion" (DEI). The order—and the decision by some companies including Target, Walmart, Amazon to roll back DEI programs—has been named by some participants in Friday's economic blackout as a reason to withhold their spending from the corporations.
"We don't have to reward corporations that have abandoned their DEI policies to align themselves with Trump's racist, homophobic, misogynistic agenda," said Reich. "We have choices."
"It is promising that people are responding to the current moment by showing their distrust of these corporations."
Schwartz's posts about the blackout on social media went viral in recent weeks, with 700,000 people sharing his Instagram post and the content generating 8.5 million total views.
The boycott has gained the attention of celebrities with wide followings including actor Mark Ruffalo and author Stephen King.
While one marketing expert, Anna Tuchman of Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management, toldThe Associated Press that the boycott was unlikely to lead to "long-run sustained decreases in economic activity" that would impact the financial bottom line of Amazon, Target, Walmart, and other affected companies, she noted that the blackout could make an impact on daily sales.
"I think this is an opportunity for consumers to show that they have a voice on a single day," said Tuchman.
Based on information from a data company called Placer.ai, the one-day blackout is likely not the only action many shoppers have been taking.
During the week of February 10, according to the company, which uses phone location date to track visits to stores, foot traffic dropped at Target stores by 7.9% and at Walmart by 4.8%, while it increased by 4.8% at Costco locations; Costco has defended its DEI policies under the Trump administration.
Joseph Feldman of financial research firm Telsey Advisory Group told clients that recent data "shows a clear drop in traffic in late January into mid-February following [one] company's step back from DEI."
According to Schwartz's website, more economic blackouts—both wide-scale and those targeting specific corporations—are being planned for the coming weeks.
The People's Union USA called for an Amazon blackout, including Whole Foods, during the week of March 7; a boycott of Nestlé to protest water exploitation and child labor during the week of March 21; and 24-hour economic blackouts on March 28 and April 18.
In a separate push, labor unions led by the United Auto Workers have already begun preparing for a general strike on May 1, 2028—International Solidarity Day.
Friday's blackout comes on the heels of news that consumer confidence plummeted in February, likely leading some corporations to already have felt the impact of fewer shoppers. Analysts linked the drop in consumer spending to anxiety stemming from Trump's mass firing of federal workers and his threatened tariffs on imports from the European Union, Canada, and Mexico.
The video posted by Schwartz on Instagram recently rallied consumers by telling them that "corporations profit off of our labor while keeping wages low, banks steal billions through inflation and predatory policies, politicians accept bribes disguised as donations while ignoring the people."
"They have taken everything from us while convincing us we should be grateful of the scraps," said Schwartz. "And that ends now."
With enthusiasm and media coverage of the blackout spreading in recent days, Aaron Vansintjan, co-author of The Future Is Degrowth: A Guide to a World Beyond Capitalism, toldThe Intercept that "people are getting a sense that they're ripped off, that they're being taken advantage of and exploited as consumers."
"It is promising that people are responding to the current moment by showing their distrust of these corporations," said Vansintjan, whose book calls for reducing consumption and production of fossil fuels, factory-farmed meat products, and other goods that harm the planet.
Vansintjan noted that consumers have power that is more limited than that of unionized workers and tenants, who can organize for fair wages, working conditions, and rent prices.
"It's hard to have an impact where you shop, because most of us don't actually have much of a choice in that," Vansintjan said.
Schwartz toldThe Washington Post: "We are the economy. We are the workforce."
Corporate retailers, he said, "benefit only because we get up every day and do what we do. If we stop, they have nothing, and it's time for them to accept that truth."
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Resisting Trump and Musk’s Cultural Revolution
Team MAGA wants a “second American Revolution” that roots out all vestiges of progressivism, liberalism, and secularism and that “will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.”
Feb 22, 2025
The aging leader wanted to shake up his country, so he launched a second revolution with the help of a cadre of young people. Drunk with power, the leader targeted his enemies, remade his political party, and turned his own government into a self-destructing circus. Anyone with real expertise was sent far away from the political center. Intellectuals of all kinds came under suspicion. And the young people who rose up in support of the aging leader ran roughshod through society.
They might not seem to have a lot in common, Mao Zedong and Donald Trump. The Communist leader, having come to power through a revolutionary war, harbored a visceral hatred for capitalism. The American businessman shirked military service, won the presidency (twice) through democratic elections, and harbors a visceral hatred for communism.
And yet, Trump is currently involved in a cultural revolution as thoroughgoing in its ambitions and potential destructiveness as what Mao unleashed in China in the mid-1960s.
You Say You Want a Revolution?
At one level, what Donald Trump and his minions are doing is regime change, as Anne Applebaum has argued. They aren’t reforming U.S. government. They are transforming its operating system, courtesy of Elon Musk and his inaptly named Department of Government Efficiency( DOGE).
Regime change is certainly part of the Trump game plan. He has borrowed this strategy from Viktor Orban, who turned Hungary’s political system based on liberal principles into a patronage system run along illiberal lines. The Orban transformation relied on a compliant legislature that allowed him to concentrate power in the executive. Once a leading liberal, the Hungarian leader knew how to deconstruct the Hungarian political system from the inside by stacking the courts, suppressing civil society, and controlling a right-wing media.
You’d think that regime change would be enough for Trump. He is a man of unpredictable utterances but rather constrained ambitions. He wants to punish his enemies, reward his friends, stay out of jail, and secure his financial and political legacy. Those around Trump, however, are pushing for something more extreme. They have cast him in the role of the Great Helmsman—Mao’s favorite moniker—who steers American society into turbulent, uncharted waters.
Mao, of course, wanted to pull China into a modern future. Trump and company promise something more high-tech, but they are really more interested in dragging the United States back to an imagined past.
Team MAGA wants a “second American Revolution” that roots out all vestiges of progressivism, liberalism, and secularism and that “will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be,” according to Kevin Roberts of the Heritage Foundation. By “left,” Roberts means anyone who follows the Constitution, acknowledges the importance of international law, and has a moral conscience.
This more revolutionary program owes much to Chairman Mao who, in 1966, decided that Chinese society was so infected with various strains of reformism (capitalism, liberalism, traditionalism) that it, too, needed another revolution. On top of that, Mao unleashed the power of populism—the “masses” in the vernacular of that time and place—to eliminate his political enemies. “It was a power struggle waged… behind the smokescreen of a fictitious mass movement,” writes Belgian scholar Pierre Ryckmans.
In the 1950s, after the country’s first revolution, Chinese society remained fundamentally conservative. The economy was primarily agrarian and Confucianism was still strong, particularly in the countryside. China was also elitist, with a Communist leader like Zhou Enlai born into the mandarin class and Mao himself coming from wealthy landowning stock. The Communists didn’t just aspire to change China’s governance. They wanted to turn Chinese society into something considerably more urban, industrial, secular, literate, and egalitarian. The change would be violent, if necessary, because Mao believed that “revolution was not a dinner party” (one wonders if Kevin Roberts has a copy of the Little Red Book on his bedside table).
At first, Mao relied on the party and its repressive institutions to effect change. By the mid-1950s, he launched an effort at reform, the Thousand Flowers Campaign, that spiraled out of the party’s control, which generated the backlash of the Anti-Rightist Campaign. That was, in turn, followed by the disastrous economic experiments of the Great Leap Forward. These whiplash changes in policy created considerable anxiety among the Chinese leadership that the party, and the revolution more generally, was losing its hold over the population, which understandably didn’t know where to turn. Mao ultimately decided that only another revolution could break the country’s ties with its past.
The agents of Mao’s Cultural Revolution were the Red Guards, teenagers who heeded Mao’s call for transformation by taking the law into their own hands. They attacked capitalist-roaders, “bourgeois” teachers, and ultimately each other. Chinese society descended into such chaos that some people even fled over the border into North Korea, which was seen as a place of relative sanity. That’s how violent, unpredictable, and apocalyptic China was during the Cultural Revolution, which lasted nearly a decade until Mao’s death in 1976.
Trumpists have their counterpart to Mao’s desire for revolutionary transformation: a plan to destroy everything in the federal government except the royal presidency and the Pentagon, and privatize everything in the country that has a tinge of the public to it.
The Trumpian equivalents of the Red Guards are a motley crew. There’s “Big Balls,” 19-year-old Edward Coristine, a DOGE-employed hacker who, among other questionable ventures, administers “an AI-powered Discord bot operating in Russia.” Then there’s 25-year-old Marco Elez, a DOGE staffer who resigned after the revelation of his racist tweets (but whom Musk has promised to rehire). The parallel with China is not precise, since there are plenty of non-teenagers who are involved in this insurrection, including the middle-aged January 6 rioter Peter Marocco, who is slated to head up USAID. Whatever their age, however, these Trumpists are true believers, enthusiastically feeding democracy into the woodchipper.
Mao, of course, wanted to pull China into a modern future. Trump and company promise something more high-tech, but they are really more interested in dragging the United States back to an imagined past.
Why Trumpians Take Culture Seriously
The Trump administration’s attacks on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) are not just a response to some recent fad. They are, as in China, an effort to radically revamp the very culture.
Since the 1960s, the United States has become a more inclusive country, which has necessarily meant that white men have lost some part of their privileged positions in education, employment, and entertainment. By the 2000s, the United States still had a long way to go, but in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement, anti-racism books were on the best-seller list, major corporations were examining their hiring and promoting policies, and educational institutions were finally beginning to address structural racism.
Perhaps if we can hold the line here, in these opening months of the Trump-Musk cultural revolution, we can avoid all the mayhem and destruction that China experienced in the 1960s.
Cultural transformations always move two steps forward and one step backward. In this case, the backlash has been much more intense, with Trump and company eager to rewind the clock to before the various civil rights movements, back even before the 14th Amendment that added birthright citizenship to the Constitution in 1868. The Trump administration has tried to impose gender categories that define the trans community out of existence. It is restricting abortion access at home and abroad, fulfilling the candidate’s promise to help women “whether they like it or not.”
In the same way that Mao tried to make everything in China public—business, meals, child-rearing—Trump wants to privatize everything from schools to the post office. He is opening up government to conservative Christians, and religious institutions are poised to claw back as much public power as they can get.
Mao thought that he was pushing with history’s tide. China’s current capitalist trajectory suggests otherwise, even though the regime change implemented by the Communist Party has remained more or less intact. The party remains in charge, but the culture shows few enduring influences of the Cultural Revolution.
With far-right politicians on the rise around the world, Trump and Musk similarly believe that they are on the cutting edge of change. But mass deportations and boosted birthrates among “tradwives” won’t prevent America from losing its white-majority status in about 20 years. DEI is no fad. It is an accurate reflection of demographics. And short of imposing totalitarian control and setting up concentration camps, the MAGA crowd won’t be able to alter this trajectory.
Welcome Back to 2025
This is not the first time I’ve written about the parallels between Trump and Mao’s Cultural Revolution. In 2022, safely ensconced in the Biden era but plagued by nightmares of the future, I wrote an article entitled “The Terrifying World of 2025” for TomDispatch. It was and is a world of mass deportations, where “Social Security checks and Medicare benefits have been delayed because the federal bureaucracy has shrunk to near invisibility.” Here was my look into the future, which is now our present:
On his first day in office, the president signaled his new policy by authorizing a memorial on the Capitol grounds to the “patriots” of January 6 and commissioning a statue of the QAnon shaman for the Rotunda. He then appointed people to his cabinet who not only lacked the expertise to manage their departments but were singularly devoted to destroying the bureaucracies beneath them, not to speak of the country itself. He put militia leaders in key Defense Department roles and similarly filled the courts with extremists more suited to playing reality-show judges than real life ones. In all of this, the president has been aided by a new crop of his very own legislators, men and women who know nothing about Congress and actively flouted its rules and traditions even as they made the MAGA caucus the dominant voting bloc.
My piece focused on one part of this nightmare scenario—the dispatch of all newly unemployed federal employees, academics, and journalists to take the jobs vacated by deported immigrants. That has yet to take place, but Musk’s acquisition of all federal data could serve as the basis for a MAGA Corps of workers that fill the gaps in the private sector.
The Trump team is currently stress-testing U.S. democracy to see where and how it breaks. Perhaps if we can hold the line here, in these opening months of the Trump-Musk cultural revolution, we can avoid all the mayhem and destruction that China experienced in the 1960s.
Back in 2022, I was not optimistic in my crystal-ball-gazing:
I know this nightmare won’t end overnight. China’s Cultural Revolution stretched on for nearly a decade and resulted in as many as 2 million dead. Our now-captive media doesn’t report on the growing violence in this country, but we’ve heard rumors about mobs attacking a courageous podcaster in Georgia and vigilantes targeting a lone abortion provider in Texas. Things might get a lot worse before they get better.
Things could indeed get a lot worse. The mass deportations haven’t begun in earnest. The courts have hit pause on a number of Trump’s more egregious moves. The worst of the new Cabinet members—Tulsi Gabbard, Pete Hegseth, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—have yet to make their marks.
But I’d like to believe that Trump and Musk, for all the power they currently deploy, are basically spitting into the wind. But it’s up to us, with every breath we take, to make sure that all that ugly spittle ends up back on the face of MAGA.
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